Monday, January 08, 2007

Anti-Authority

After a long hiatus, I'm back. Hope everyone out there had nice breaks. My wife and I had a wonderful first Christmas here in Kentucky and then a wonderful second Christmas in Maine. We're back in the swing of things, and I'm itching to blog.

I want to talk this week about the anti-authority attitude so common today, particularly among my generation and the generation that raised it, the Boomer generation. I've been thinking a good deal about the basic attitudes that lie under one's worldview. There are whole currents of thought that exist in our mind that we are not able to see (until we think deeply and then have discussions). In the Christian world, we are trained to see our sin, so we are trained in one sense to look deeply into ourselves and examine ourselves. We do not play the games of hide-and-seek with our sin that the lost world tragically does. We understand ourselves to be sinners and so we take pains to point out to ourselves our sins. We then confess and fight them for all our days.

Yet while we're pretty adept at confessing the moment-by-moment sins, the lustful looks and angry thoughts, we're not so good at spotting the major attitudes that underlie our sins and drive our behavior. We also naturally suffer from generational blindness, whereby we think every generation has thought and lived just as we do. In fact, we are all conditioned and affected by our generation. We may not be in wholesale agreement with it, for sure. But there are all kinds of major attitudinal areas that we do not see that inform and drive our behavior. I want to look at those areas in coming days. So this week, we'll look at how we quietly (and not so quietly) anti-authority. We'll examine this trend in the culture and in the church. I hope you'll converse with me as we think about this together.

1 Comments:

Thanks for posting on this crucial issue of our day. Postmodernism has really called the whole concept of authority into question. Its relativism combined with its skepticism of knowledge makes for a tough environment for authority to thrive.

I especially look forward with great anticipation to what you have to say about this crisis in the church.

About Me

PhD student in Historical Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Managing Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at TEDS. Married to a woman of noble character, Bethany. Grateful for this life, excited for the next.